JIM IRSAY COLLECTION SUPPLEMENT
more. Had anyone else bought it that afternoon, it would have lived out its days as exactly what it was: a production instrument with no more intrinsic value than its commodity status.
The finish, for what it’ s worth, was never stock. The guitar left Fender( or possibly Manny’ s; sources disagree) with a black respray over its original sunburst. Everything else about it was a standard off-the-rack Strat. Which is precisely the point.
Gilmour never treated the Black Strat as precious. He treated it the way a serious working musician treats a serious working instrument: as a platform to be improved, adjusted, and revised in the service of sound. The neck alone was swapped at least six or seven times. The original maple neck gave way to a rosewood fingerboard neck during the Dark Side of the Moon sessions; later, a maple neck carried through most of the’ 80s. At any given point in the guitar’ s history, a substantial percentage of its original parts had been replaced. A veritable Ship of Theseus.
The pickup history alone reads like a chronicle of Gilmour’ s evolving ear: stock Fender single-coils, then a Gibson PAF humbucker briefly installed in the bridge position, then a DiMarzio FS-1, eventually a Seymour Duncan SSL-1C. He added a mini-toggle switch to access a neck-and-bridge combination
COLLECTIBLE GUITAR | 125